Broken link checker

What is Broken Link Checker?

Broken Link Checker is the umbrella term for a set of tools and reports inside Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

Broken Link Checker helps you build a stronger backlink profile by "fixing the web." Use it to quickly find broken inbound and outbound links on relevant websites and turn them into your quality backlinks.

You won’t need a pile of plugins, browser extensions and web services for your broken link building campaigns anymore.

Backed up by the largest database of live backlinks and the tremendous crawling speed of AhrefsBot, it is the perfect tool for getting information about broken backlinks across the web. We update our backlink index every 15 minutes to make sure you always get up-to-the-minute broken link data.

Finding strong backlink opportunities is really easy with this tool.

Discover backlinks to your competitors’ “missing” content pages

A link that leads to an “error 404” page is called a ‘broken link’ (also known as a ‘dead link’).

The most effective way to take advantage of broken link building opportunities is to get a list of your competitors' 404 content pages, see who still is linking to them, and suggest your own content as a “fix”.

Plug your rival’s website URL into Ahrefs Site Explorer, go to the “Best by links” report, and apply the “404 not found” filter in “HTTP codes”.

You will see a list of the website’s “missing” pages along with the number of referring domains and referring pages that still link to them. 404 pages with the largest number of backlinks are most attractive for broken link building.

To take advantage of a broken backlink, head over to Archive.org, check what used to be on the "dead" page, and see if you have anything to offer as a replacement on your own website.

Alternatively, if Archive.org can’t help, you can guess what used to be on that page from the anchor text and the text that surrounds it. You can see them in our tool directly.

Then reach out to the linking page's webmaster or editor and suggest a link to your content as a fix.

You see the full list of web pages that link to a dead page when you click a number in the “Dofollow” column.

Find broken outgoing links on relevant websites

If you know a website you want to get a backlink from, put it into Ahrefs Site Explorer and go to the “Broken Links” report in the “Outgoing links” section. You will see all the pages with broken outgoing links that this website has.

Sort them by URL Rating to target backlink opportunities from the strongest pages first, reach out to the relevant site owner or editor, and offer your content as a replacement.

A more advanced approach includes batch analysis of URLs in Ahrefs Site Explorer to find pages with the largest number of backlinks. Acquiring broken links from these pages will bring your content more "link juice."

Fix your own site’s broken links and backlinks

Finding and fixing broken backlinks to your own website is probably the easiest way to get link juice. These backlinks are already yours, but do not help your content rank.

Put your website’s URL into Ahrefs Site Explorer, go to the “Best by links” report, and apply the “404 not found” filter in “HTTP codes”.

Alternatively, you can use the “Broken” report in the “Backlinks” section to see the strongest broken backlinks to your website.

You can easily regain these links by restoring the missing pages or by setting up 301 redirects to other pages on your site.

Apart from broken backlinks, you can find broken outbound links on your website. They have a negative impact on your visitors' user experience, and thus need your attention.

Export broken links and backlinks

If you need to store, use, or analyze broken link and backlink data outside Ahrefs, you can export it to a CSV file in just two clicks.